They should abolish the Congressional Budget Office. It is corrupt. It is dishonest. It was totally wrong on ObamaCare by huge, huge margins," Gingrich said to Fox's Martha MacCallum on "The First 100 Days."

I don't trust a single word they have published and I don't believe them."

The CBO actually wasn't off by all that much on Obamacare but we'll chalk that up to the usual right wing alternative facts. Instead, it's the accusations of corruption and demands for dissolution that betray a fundamental lack of moral or intellectual integrity in the conservative movement. Considering Gingrich is supposed to be one the right's smartest, that bodes poorly for the rest of them.

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And just to make the entire exercise even more sinister, there's this salient fact pointed out by the Huffington Post's Sam Stein:

And that's where this gets ugly. I know we're supposed to be in a "post-truth" reality but if you viciously attack even institutions you control and call them corrupt when they tell you something you don't want to hear, there's little hope left for proper stewardship. This regression has been a long time coming. Ever since the Republican Party abandoned governing in favor of short term victory, the result was always going to be an increasingly unhinged leadership at war with everyone, including themselves. What you're left with is a group of people that cannot carry out even the basic functions of good governance and are laughably incapable of crafting workable legislation.

The troubling part for the GOP is that there doesn't seem to be anyway out of this death spiral. With Fox News, Drudge, Breitbart, and AM Hate Radio inflating the bubble of unreality to monstrous proportions for a monstrous profit, the only way out is to reject the whole meshugganah. But at this point, that would also mean shedding more than half of their voting base, essentially committing immediate electoral suicide rather than the protracted slow death they're already experiencing.

It doesn't seem like there's enough spine left in the entire Republican Party to make that kind of principled stand so we'll be forced to watch one of our two major political parties continue to erode our democracy in a mad dash to stay ahead of its own inevitable collapse. The question is will they take all of us into the abyss with them?